Long form magazine articles are online to stay, here’s why

The Independent asks if "snappy websites will kill off lengthy magazine articles", ironically in a lengthy magazine article:

Time’s Josh Tyrangiel argued that the culture of rapid-fire news on the internet meant that Time magazine’s distinctive essays were just "too long" to work on its website. In his view, the web had rendered the entire form obsolete.

A lot depends on how you decide what killing off means. While I’ve not got my hands on any solid data for the whole internet, the online world of the Eurovision Song Contest, with a number of websites, a measurable number of dedicated fans, and a lot of casual browsers (that turn up once a year) makes for a good sample.

I’ve talked before about why I set up ESC Insight, but what you need to know here is that it writes about the Song Contest in long form, have a look at this article on voting at the 2011 Contest for an idea. The Eurovision community is pretty tight knit, so I can ask the team at ESC Daily (which covers daily news as it happens, short form and immediate) what their stats are like.

Turns out that while page views (and thus ad impressions) are much higher, the unique visitors over a decent time periods, say around a week, are broadly in line over the two sites.

Naturally this has an impact on some areas of the media landscape – the obvious one on how you generate income if the display ad route pushes you in one direction – but I’m in a glass half-full mood this morning. There’s just as much appetite for long-form out there, it’s just that people don’t keep refreshing your site generating false page views to get it.